Interviews
Chasing the Thing That Can’t Be Changed
Unbecoming Human — Interview with TJ Shin
Para-institutional Kinshasa—Interview with Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo
Lauren Tate Baeza and Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo talk about particularities of how a continent-wide trend of community-centered and para-institutional arts organizing unfolds in his hometown of Kinshasa; his personal journey from artist to administrator; and his own organization, Kin ArtStudio.
War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Justice Truths and Rights
War Inna Babylon is not an exhibition; it is an everyday lived reality. Although we’ve exhibited some of the experience, I want people to feel it, feel like they have to do something, and [then] ask what we do next. To understand that you can’t sit on the fence, because if you do, you are supporting the status quo.
Indicting the Poisonous Imaginary—Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal
In 2021 D’Souza and Staal came together to stage the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. Described as “a more-than-human tribunal to prosecute intergenerational climate crimes” committed by Unilever, ING, Airbus, and the Dutch state, the court drew from D’Souza’s book What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations.
Greg Ito: Looking Back to Let Go
This is probably the most personal show I’ve made. I want people to know that the work is connected to these real experiences, so there’s pretty intimate stuff that’s only been seen within our family circle .… I had to ask my mom if it was okay to share these photographs. Since we weren’t able to get permission from relatives who have passed to share these things, all the faces are going to be covered with small white stickers. That way we can keep our family identities private and off the internet. These stickers also create a pathway for viewers to insert themselves into [my family’s] experience.
Pearl Cleage: Fragile Bodies on a Fragile Planet
The thing that strikes me more and more as I get older is how we spend so much time and energy and bluster building cities, having wars, dominating and insulting each other, when all the time, we are living inside these fragile bodies that have to exist on a fragile planet in the company of other fragile beings and unknown viruses.
Curtis Patterson: A Monument Maker Gets His Due
Melissa Messina, the show’s curator, speaks with Patterson about teaching, monuments to civil rights leaders, and his current studio practice, on the occasion of the artist’s first commercial gallery exhibition.
Itziar Barrio: Stella!—working on, and through You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid was filmed in multiple cities and makes overt narrative references to three films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), La estrategia del caracol (The Strategy of the Snail) (1993) and Accattone (1961).
Ge Yulu: Cutting In—Dances with the State and the Collective
Ge Yulu’s artistic practice playfully pulls at the strings of a social system that, although seemingly all-encompassing, is in fact a malleable structure consisting of individual human beings.
